A question I received: Can changing your name help you change your destiny? I heard that certain letters can help improve people’s lives.

My Answer: Besides the Upper Light, there is nothing that can change our destiny. Even when it seems like we change it, later we find out that it only got worse. That’s because in doing so, we avoid becoming corrected by the Upper Light, and hence we start lagging behind in correction, and this evokes negative correcting forces – greater blows of fate.

The problem with amulets, spells, and mysticism is that they distract us, and we start being late with correcting ourselves. This causes an accumulation of evil that’s expressed as suffering. So the suffering doesn’t come from above, but it’s our own uncorrected properties turning against us.

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A question I received: What does Light mean in the spiritual sense? What is the difference between the Light in the lower spiritual worlds compared to the higher ones that are closer to the Creator?

My Answer: Everything that is received in the Kli (the soul) is called Light. See this definition in Talmud Eser Sefirot. The difference between the Lights is not the Lights in and of themselves, but the vessels, Kli, the desires they fill – the measure of bestowal, the force of correction.

Likewise, the light in our world is simple and white, but it consists of the seven lights or colors because potentially it can be revealed by the seven kinds of Kli. However it doesn’t exist on its own. There is no Light outside the Kli; there is no Creator outside creation.

We only study matter and its form. We are unable to study the abstract form and the essence since we can’t attain them in a reliable way. In outer space, there is no light, but only darkness, because there is no object that could stop it or reflect it – there is no Kli.

Thus, when light goes through glass, which absorbs one of the light’s components, it is perceived as the absorbed light. If the glass absorbs red waves, then the light is perceived as red. So we don’t sense the Light in and of itself, but only its expression in the soul. More accurately, the soul’s or desire’s reaction to something external in the spiritual world is called Light. In other words, the Light is the property of bestowal which the soul has attained and which it now senses. So we don’t see the Light, but the properties of the Kli or soul, which are expressed through something called Light.

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Two questions I received about using Kabbalah incorrectly and the possible outcomes of doing so

Question: Is there a chance that someone will start studying Kabbalah “too early,” and then not have the time to develop his ego, in order to then defeat it and transform it to the will to bestow? After all “The Light is only born out of darkness.” While one’s will to receive develops, one can use this time to build his career, create a family and provide for it, so that later he would really be able to concentrate on studying Kabbalah and growing spiritually (for example, after he’s forty years old).

My Answer: A person should test Kabbalah as soon as he hears about it, because one must develop everything harmoniously from the early years: family, children, work, etc., as well as spiritual development. Otherwise he will grow up to be an animal and his entire life will have gone to waste. Kabbalists do not put any age restrictions on revealing Kabbalah. Moreover, they write that if it were up to them, they would teach Kabbalah to children from an early age. My students and I teach our children Kabbalah while they are still babies – after all, this is the most necessary knowledge a person can have, and without it he’s just a miserable animal. With this education we protect our kids from drugs and other problems; they stay with us and do the same thing their parents do – it’s been tested!

Question: I’m scared, I think that I won’t be able to resurrect, I’m afraid that I’m not doing enough, that I lack strength and desire.

My Answer: The worst thing that can happen is that you won’t attain your full correction in this life, and then you’ll return into this world again to “finish correcting yourself.” You will definitely return if you don’t finish the correction, because in the final and perfect state, we already exist in “state 3,” and it must be really attained by everyone!

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Two questions I received on loving others

Question: We have to love everyone who was created by the Creator. But what about the people who hurt us, leaving us with severe scars? Maybe it’s possible to learn to forgive and to yield, but it is very difficult to love them the way you love others or yourself. My question is: Is it enough to love such people less or just to forgive them? Is it necessary to love everyone equally? And is it even possible to attain this level? I’d like to attain it.

My Answer: It’s written: A hero is someone who loves everyone. A hero amongst heroes is someone who has turned his enemies into his beloved. And in spirituality, it’s someone who has transformed his egoism to the service of others.

Question: There are seven billion cogwheels spinning around in the world, who are all interconnected and interdependent. I have this picture in my mind day and night. Sometimes I experience flashes of epiphany, when for a moment everything becomes crystal clear, but then it disappears and I could do nothing to bring it back. Everything becomes confusing again, and I start to feel so helpless – after all, I’m a cogwheel, and I’m being spun in a completely different direction by billions of other cogwheels – and in addition, they laugh at Kabbalah. And then I watch your broadcasts and hear the wonderful news from Sochi and Moscow… How can I disengage myself from the people who are very close to me (even my relatives and children), and be close to those who are physically far, but are very dear to me?

Answer: You should look at this world through the Upper World, love people with their involuntary lack of correction, patiently strive to help them with our knowledge about the world, and understand that your intolerance of them is a result of your lack of correction!

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A question I received: Kabbalah teaches us that this world is just an illusion we depict inside our five senses, which conceals the true reality and the reason why the Creator created us. Since our egoism is related to our body, which is matter clothed in form, and since egoism is evil, then would it be correct to conclude that matter is evil, and our goal is to see beyond it into the spiritual realm? Or even more than that – to transform matter into its spiritual form? The more I study Kabbalah, the more I feel that it’s making me reject what my five senses are telling me. But of course I’m still operating and functioning in this physical world. The force of the physical world is very powerful and seductive, but it’s our obligation to fight against it.

My Answer: You shouldn’t fight against anything, except your own laziness in carrying out the instructions of Kabbalists in order to draw the Upper Light onto yourself. It will correct you, and then you’ll see how the two worlds are included one inside the other, and how everything adds up. Nothing was created in vain, but only to be used correctly. It’s a common human mistake to think that you have to correct yourself. The Upper Light created the desire, and only the Upper Light can change it. Nothing depends on the person, except making the correct plea for the Light to influence him.

Therefore, we are robots in every regard, and our only free action is a MAN – the request for correction – and Kabbalah teaches us how to do this. The fact that a person is completely governed is concealed from him, so that he won’t be coerced into reaching a connection with the Creator, but will reach it voluntarily. However, if we were to see how we are governed, we would immediately and involuntarily turn to the Light, the Creator.

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Two questions I received on the role of knowledge in spiritual advancement

Question: In order to advance, do I have to know what state I’m in and what spiritual level I’m on? And in general, how important is it for my spiritual development to have knowledge about the spiritual worlds?

My Answer: Knowledge doesn’t matter at all. However, it does help you connect to the topic (the correction of your soul). Nevertheless, the most important thing is to attract the Light of correction, and this happens during the study of authentic Kabbalistic texts. Item 155 of the Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot explains that the Light descends to the degree one desires to understand what is being said in the text, even though one doesn’t understand anything. This means that a person is trying to understand what the book says about him and his state. It’s because a Kabbalistic text includes all the states of all the souls, and every soul is able to find “its own frequency,” the frequency at which the common soul, the Creator, is speaking to it.

Question: You said that a person who advances in Kabbalah does not have to turn to books when it comes to realizing his freedom of choice, and that this is something he has to do inside. My question is: How do you keep an inner account with yourself if you don’t have the forces for it inside you? You said that a person should turn to the society when he wants to realize his freedom of choice.

My Answer: Baal HaSulam speaks about this in one of his letters. He writes that if you desire to figure something out inside you, then just be alone with yourself, without books. This way you will feel yourself and the result of what has happened to you by studying Kabbalah. You will be able to find yourself, your path, something that’s yours, instead of what others have said.

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Two questions I received on how to connect spirituality and regular life

Question: How does the spiritual world influence and enliven our world, if the two worlds aren’t connected? Do they have a “cause-and-effect” connection? If so, then why isn’t our world also perfect and eternal?

My Answer: Our world is governed entirely from above. And every day we are becoming more and more convinced of this, because no matter how we try to change things, nothing goes according to plan.

The only way we can influence the Upper World (from below upwards) is to evoke (ask for) an acceleration (but not a change) of the process of our correction (by studying in the group and disseminating). We will perceive this acceleration as if evil and suffering are replaced by goodness and pleasure.

Question: Why does a person have to separate the spiritual part of his life from the regular one?

My Answer: It’s necessary to separate the two worlds. However they aren’t separate in and of themselves, but only relative the person who attains them. Outside a person, there is only the general Light. Once a person attains the Upper World, through it he sees our world, and he is no longer confused about the origin of everything that happens and about the connections between all parts of the world. But if he starts attaining the Upper World from our world, then he will get confused and start seeing forces through objects. He will do the same thing that the religions and faiths do – start thinking that there is spirituality inside the objects of our world, worshiping material objects such as trees, lucky charms, red strings, holy water, or predicting the future. This is why Baal HaSulam writes that one first attains the Upper World, and only after such attainment, one starts researching (from the Upper World) the descending forces that form our world, and the phenomena in our world.

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A comment I received: I’m shocked and moved to tears to find out that we are also potential Nazis. Why did great Kabbalists, who attained Gmar Tikkun (final correction), continue to take part in cruel slaughter and use of animals? How can it be possible that the exalted teaching of Kabbalah ignores cruelty to animals?

It’s obvious that it won’t correct anything in the soul if we were all to become vegetarian. But great Kabbalists corrected everything and did not become lovers of miserable animals. How can this be? Maybe there are 126 levels and the time of the complete Gmar Tikkun has arrived only now, when “love thy neighbor as yourself” will also include animals, plants and the still level of nature? As far as I understand with my simple mind, we must ultimately feel love for ants and bugs as well…

My Response: There are rules for how to act in order to correspond to the general law of nature, called Elokim. Man has been created opposite to this law, and our task is to change ourselves in order to be the same as this law. This is the purpose of our existence in this world. This change in a person, from our level to the Creator’s level, can be attained only by studying Kabbalah. Baal HaSulam writes about it in the article “Introduction to the Book ‘From the Mouth of a Sage’”: “Even if a person is completely righteous in this world, knows the whole Torah and has fulfilled all the earthly commandments, but did not study Kabbalah, then he must return to this world again in order to study Kabbalah” – because only by studying Kabbalah does he attract the Light of Correction to him, as written in the “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot,” item 155.

By correcting himself, a person unwillingly acts according to the Upper Laws. When this happens, how does he relate to the nature around him? He relates to it based on the degree of his equivalence of the Creator. And no matter what he relates to, he does so based on his equivalence to the Creator. But perhaps his actions and behavior won’t seem righteous to you, because you imagine righteousness differently to what it is in the spiritual world.

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A question I received: You are constantly making stabs at the Kabbalah Centre and for the life of me I can’t understand why. They have the lineage. Rav Berg learned through Ashlag and the lineage. Is it because you were connected, but not given the Kabbalah Centre? You then started your own center. I read your books, including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kabbalah. It is a book without religion or spirituality, it is just science. I enjoyed it, but the Kabbalah Centre offers spirituality, holiday observance and they have lineage with Brandwein, Ashlag and the Ari. It just hurts me to see someone who is into Kabbalah, like yourself, putting down other people for the red string and their own beliefs. Isn’t that anti-Kabbalah?

My Answer: Personally, I consider Berg a failed Kabbalist. He just didn’t have a true teacher. Berg did not study Kabbalah with any true Kabbalist; you can ask Ashlag or Brandwein about it. No true Kabbalist could have taught him to sell Kabbalah for money. And I never wanted his center. I had a teacher – the last great Kabbalist, the eldest son of Baal HaSulam and his spiritual successor – Rav Baruch Ashlag. I was never connected to the Kabbalah Center. I was there once to give an introductory lecture and immediately understood that there is nothing to learn there. After I was studying with Rav Baruch Ashlag for a year, I offered teaching a class to Berg’s lecturers in the Kabbalah Center, in order to teach them at least something. As a result, they left his center and came to my teacher, and they became Kabbalists. That acquaintance and my visit to his center took place in 1980, but I opened my center only in 1995. Please tell me: what Kabbalistic sources are used for study in those “Kabbalah” centers? What works of the great Kabbalists do they study there? But after all, it’s only by studying them that a person receives the recognition of evil and its correction (Ohr Makif). And about me envying Berg: There was a time when I was giving lectures in LA and he offered me a teaching job in his center. I said I would do it, but on the condition that we study from the original sources. He laughed when I said this to him, and he told me “Who will pay you the kind of money for this that I’m now getting?” And he was right…

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Two questions I received about prayer

Question: You said that the Creator is inside us and that there is nothing outside us. Then what are the influences that make a person feel awe and wonder? And if the Creator is inside us, then whom do we thank and whom do we pray to?

My Answer: We pray for ourselves, in order to change and to feel that we are givers. To pray (in Hebrew: Lehitpalel) means “to judge oneself.” We don’t do this for the Creator, but for ourselves. These are our entreaties for the quality of bestowal and love, which we call the Creator. It’s forbidden (because it’s incorrect) for us to envision Him – this property – in any form other than as this property, without an image or matter. We are filled by the Upper Force, which has no form, volume, or matter. However, we don’t feel this. We will feel it to the extent that we acquire this property. Our objective is for our desires to begin “bestowing” instead of “receiving.” When we aspire to this quality, we evoke the influence of the Upper Force on us. This force is in a static state, and only our desire to become similar to it places us under a greater influence by it.

Question: We are the will to receive, and in order for our desire to change, for us to desire to act “not for the sake of ourselves,” we have to ask the Creator to help us. But how can I tell that the Creator hears my request when I ask Him to change me? What kind of change should I be feeling?

My Answer: The changes in one’s understanding that one’s nature is evil, until one finally reaches the desire to come out of one’s nature – this “realization of evil” happens under the influence of the Creator’s Light. And then the “Action of Goodness” takes place – one’s intention during every action is changed to “love and bestowal.” The Upper Light of correction affects you to the degree that you desire to correct yourself. But you cannot develop this desire on your own; you can only get it from the outside, from people like you who aspire toward the same goal. By “buying” their desires, you will be able to evoke such powerful Upper Light onto yourself, that it will change you and make you a “giver,” and then you will immediately feel this property, that is, you will reveal the Creator!

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