Two questions I received about men’s and women’s desires

Question: As I understand, a man has to feel all the women’s desires as his own, and then ask for their correction. But what about a woman – does she feel only her own desire? And does she then need to transfer it to the men?

My Answer: A man should feel all the desires of the whole world as his own, and ask for their correction. A woman can feel only her own desire and aspire to transfer it to the men’s group, to those who aspire to the Mutual Guarantee (Arvut).

Question: If a woman is Malchut, the will to receive, then how can she attain the quality of bestowal?

My Answer: She does it by transferring her will to receive to the men’s part, the will to bestow, and this results in the desire “to receive for the sake of bestowal,” which is equivalent to bestowal.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Women’s Spiritual Progress
Laitman.com Post: We Are the Pioneers!
Laitman.com Post: Woman = Desire
Lesson for Women at the 2005 North American Kabbalah Congress

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A question I received: What is death and how can a person stop being afraid of it?

My Answer: When a person identifies himself with the animate level (the body), then he is afraid of its death, since he also sees this as the end of his “I’s” existence. But if he’s already begun identifying himself with the soul, that is to say, he generally begins perceiving himself in his inner life, he feels his “I” beyond the animate level (the body), he perceives himself through the point in the heart, unites with the points of others and starts living in others, then he attains the state of confidence (of course, under the influence of Ohr Makif), and knows that even if the physical body will die, he has already acquired a new, spiritual body! And at the moment of death he perceives his physical body as if he is being undressed and is parting with it. In general, it’s a psychological problem. It’s because one feels oneself as living in the body – in one’s desires. The main solution lies in interacting in the group. It’s because when you start perceiving the desires of others (your “neighbors”) instead of your own desires, then you acquire an eternal body or desire outside of you.

Related Material:
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Purchase the Book: Shamati (I Heard)

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A question I received: Dear Rav Laitman, could you please explain how does Kabbalah treat marriage and differences in perception between husband and wife? Kabbalah has already explained a great deal to me. Does Kabbalah treat a relationship between husband and wife as a sacred one or is it up to one`s desire to decide whether to follow the path? Thank you for helping us to understand what was considered “a secret.”

My Answer: “Sacred” is the quality of bestowal, which we acquire under the influence of the Light of Correction (Ohr Makif), when we correctly study Kabbalah (the books of Baal HaSulam). There is no other sacredness! It’s written: “There is no coercion in spirituality.” In corporeality, coercion originates from egoism. But it cannot exist in the spiritual world and in spiritual actions.

Every person has his own path and his own time to come to the Creator, and therefore you don’t have the right to force anyone to do this, including your husband and children. You can only tell them about it without pressuring them, “by the way,” gently, without threatening them, and evoking love for this topic in them. And no matter what the result, you should continue with your family life just like before.

Uniting with everyone who aspires toward the Creator will give you the strength and the desire to attain Him. You should view your relatives as bodies that are related to you, and as souls that are foreign to you.

Related Material:
Part 6, Ch. 4 from the eBook Interview with the Future: What Should One Go Through in Order to Attain Spirituality?
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eBook: The Path of Kabbalah – Revealing the Hidden Wisdom
Purchase the Book: The Path of Kabbalah – Revealing the Hidden Wisdom

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A question I received: I have been reading and watching different Kabbalistic materials over the course of this past year. Sometimes I’m very interested in Kabbalah, and other times I get too busy doing daily things and searching for pleasure. Over this period of time I gradually started feeling that something is happening inside of me. I became sadder and less satisfied. But some time ago, my life and my previous sensations have completed the changes they were going through. I have experienced a loss, and suddenly my heart started hurting so bad that I didn’t know where to hide from this pain. I realized that there is nothing else in this world that could satisfy me. For the first time in my life I started to desire studying Kabbalah with passion. I started watching the beginners’ course over the internet. The first lesson was like heaven to me. I don’t know why I was feeling so incredibly well while watching it. My heart still hurts every time I don’t watch lessons.

My Answer: There is one path for everybody, and nobody can choose another path. There’s an opportunity to take the path toward the goal of creation consciously, while others go against their will, and with a much slower speed. A person following the conscious path also experiences plenty of sadness and stress, but everything depends on the environment. One needs to close one’s eyes and give himself fully to the environment. Everyday there are more unhappy and devastated people in the world. Just imagine that you’re going to the same place that they are, and that the only difference is that they are walking, while you’re flying past them in parallel on an escalator. The fast changes in your mood, thoughts, and inner life happen because of the increase in your speed relative to others.

Related Material:
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Questions I received about the Creator

Question: What is the Creator? Does He have desires and feelings?

My Answer: The Creator is the general force of Nature that incorporates everything. His quality is bestowal (love). This is His only force. From His quality of loving and bestowing, He created creation in the quality “to receive” – to receive what He desires to give it. But even though He created creation in the will to receive, He is leading it to acquire the quality of bestowal, to His state, which is boundless, unique, and perfect.

Question: In the article “The Revelation of Godliness (Matan Torah)” Baal HaSulam writes that the first condition is that “No one acts without a purpose,” and “There is a Creator in the world who created everything with a purpose.” What does “the first condition” mean?

My Answer: The first condition is the basic law of nature.

Question (continued): Do I have to accept this as a fact, even though I don’t have the notion that the Creator is real?

My Answer: You should accept it in order to test it on yourself, to reveal the Creator within you, within the property of bestowal you will acquire. It’s just like a scientist who receives news about someone else’s discovery – he accepts it and then tests whether it is correct. If a person attains the revelation of the Creator’s actions, then to the degree he reveals this, he justifies Him and hence he himself is then called “righteous.” That is to say, in Kabbalah one tests everything in practice, and every person does this within himself!

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Two questions I received on the correction of a woman’s soul

Question: You have provided many explanations about a man’s path of correction – he studies, works in the group, and through this attracts upon himself the Light that returns to the source and corrects his soul. I’m trying to understand how a woman corrects her soul, and the only answer I can find is that she doesn’t attract upon herself the Light that returns to the source, that this is the man’s work, and that a woman needs to study and disseminate, and this way she corrects her soul. Can you give a more detailed explanation of the spiritual process that a woman’s soul goes through when she studies and disseminates on her path to correction?

My Answer: The difference is:
1. A woman does not unite with other women in a group, in “love for her neighbor or for her girlfriends,” but rather she unites with other women only through helping each other disseminate Kabbalah.
2. She doesn’t receive help directly from above, the way the men’s group does, but receives it through the men’s group. This is explained in the story about the reception of the Torah, where the men carry out the condition of Mutual Guarantee (Arvut), and the women support them with their desire. As a result they receive it together – the men conduct the Light to the women. The difference is only the order in which they receive the Light from above, and it practically doesn’t matter. That is to say, a woman doesn’t feel it in any way if she studies and disseminates. Moreover, a woman should study Kabbalah only to the extent that she feels a need to do so, and no more than that, whereas the men are obligated to study between one and three hours a day.

Question: Today women are reaching the same spiritual states that you, the men, are going through. But you have a safety net – a group of Bnei Baruch wives. What about us – women and mothers, and what about our children?

My Answer: The men of the world Kli have the support of the women’s part of the world Kli. This is what I feel, whereas you are looking at bodies instead of spiritual desires. A spiritual desire is not connected to the body, it’s beyond it. Imagine the world without our bodies – a space filled with uncorrected desires that aspire to be filled, rather than to bestow to one another and connect into one common desire. These desires subdivide into active ones – masculine, and passive ones – feminine. It’s similar to conception, where the male cells move and penetrate the female cells. And then a new body is born – a common desire.

Related Material:
A Talk about Women’s Spiritual Development, #1
A Talk about Women’s Spiritual Development, #2

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Three questions I received on study, work and dissemination

Question: Does it matter how much time I spend studying – two hours or half an hour? Will I attract more Ohr Makif (Surrounding Light) if I study for two hours?

My Answer: It’s sufficient to study between one to three hours a day. The most important thing is your intention while studying. Read the “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot,” Items 10-20, which discusses this. You should divide your time so that half of it is used for studying and half for disseminating Kabbalah in the world. And it’s best to do both of these in a group – either physical or virtual.

Question: After Kabbalah lessons, we are faced with life, work or school. What should I do when I am at school?

My Answer: Push aside all thoughts about Kabbalah and only do what you are supposed to. Later you will be able to combine the two correctly.

Question: Can I disseminate even if I still don’t understand what Kabbalah is talking about?

My Answer: The understanding will come to you gradually, precisely to the extent that you participate in dissemination. Look at the example of Joshua – he helped Moshe disseminate the knowledge, helped arrange things, but he didn’t study himself. By helping, he mastered the knowledge and became Moshe’s successor – the spiritual leader of the nation. Kabbalah isn’t passed down through diligence and intellectual understanding, but through one’s desire to be in this knowledge: desire = Kli! This is why it’s written about Kabbalah, “It’s not the smart one who understands (but the one who aspires).”

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Three questions I received on requesting from the Creator

Question: Does one pray to G-d or to the Creator? You have said that it’s written that the Creator hears no prayer other than to be able to bestow, because He is the quality of bestowal and this is the only thing you can ask of Him. And what about the “kibbutsnikim” in the Negev?

My Answer: Back then the desires of the “kibbutsnikim” and the Creator were the same. But in general, the Creator hears everything and everyone, but He reacts only to that which leads to the goal, to Him, to adhesion with Him. And He definitely hears and reacts to one’s requests for correction, for equivalence with Him. The Creator is a system of forces surrounding us. The Creator (Elokim) = Nature (HaTeva). We need to understand that He does not change His goal and action – at every single moment, everything is directed at reacting to our actions, in order to influence each and every person in such a way that they will be directed precisely toward the goal. This is how the Creator – this system of forces – reacts to our desires, thoughts, and actions. This is why Kabbalah says that He does not change. In other words, He does not change His influence on us, which directs us precisely to the goal.

Question: About the “kibbutsnikim” who asked for rain: How is it possible that they received something just by asking for it? I’ve asked for things a thousand times, and the most I received was a reason to regret the fact that I asked.

My Answer: Their requests did not contradict the Creator’s plans to have people settle in these lands. They were (egoistically) united with each other as one whole. They asked for the necessity and gave it everything they had. And it worked temporarily. But when they lost the desire to be united, they became opposite to the system of governing forces, and the Upper Forces evoked their disintegration.

Question: As I understand, a prayer is a person’s deepest and most real desire. So why is there is a custom to pray at certain times rather than when one feels like it? After all, one receives a response only to a real prayer. And what does prayer give a person, in principle?

My Answer: Religion does not deal with correcting the soul – changing one’s intention from “for the sake of oneself” to “for the sake of others and the Creator” in all of one’s actions, but rather it only trains one to make physical actions – the commandments of our world. Therefore, in religion to pray is to read at specific times something that was written for you by other people (by the sages of the Great Assembly, 2,000 years ago). One does not receive a response to such actions, and we see that religious people do not become corrected, but vice versa – as time goes by, their moral descent is becoming more and more apparent. However, such mechanical actions hold people within certain boundaries, and as such, during the period of the Creator’s concealment (from 0 until the 20th century), the religions had the role of providing life’s boundaries. This was established by Kabbalists, to last until our time, when “the point in the heart” surfaces in people and they begin the path of individual spiritual development.

Related Material:
Kabbalah Today Article: A Prayer
Article: The Difference Between Kabbalah and Religion
Chapter 7.1 from the Book The Path of Kabbalah: Prayer
Baal HaSulam Article: There Is None Else Beside Him

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Three questions I received on fitting ourselves into the the spiritual puzzle

Question: I am a bisexual man, and I always play the men’s role in my relationships with men. But in general, since I became interested in Kabbalah, I’ve lost almost all interest in both men and women. Can I study in a group?

My Answer: Please write to us describing how you view men in general when you are next to them for an extended period of time, when you study together, work together, travel together, drink together and hug each other, sing and dance together with men. What do you feel when men look at you and hug you? Once you respond, we will examine your situation further.

Question: I’ve never felt as bad as I do now. I want to change for the better, but the state I’ve been in for three days already is unbearable and horrible, ranging from the question “What’s all this for? Why do I live?” to “I don’t want to go on living.” I have Kabbalistic books, music, and lessons, and without them I wouldn’t be able to continue. But I don’t want my life to be based on the feeling that I’m being lowered into an abyss of my own dirt, and I’m trying to break out of it!

My Answer: There is nothing besides a person and the Creator – so turn to Him. Your appeal to the Creator will be more effective if you make actions of studying in a group and disseminating.

Question: Every soul is a piece of the general puzzle. Men collect their pieces together to form a Kli. When one person loses the connection and falls out of the general system, then there’s a “hole in the boat,” there’s no Light. This seems clear enough. But how does the female soul fit into this puzzle? I feel like I just don’t belong.

My Answer: This female feeling of being defective (not according to Freud, but according to Kabbalah) will accompany you (as well as all the men who are correcting their Malchut) throughout the entire path until the end of correction. You receive the Light from above through the global men’s group, the same way every man does. And just like the men, you insert your piece of the puzzle, your soul, into the common soul of Adam! You are the same as the men in every way, except for the fact that they attract the Light. The men (the male parts of the common soul) unwillingly accept your desires, and they go out to hunt and to work, in order to attract the Upper Light for everyone.

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A question I received: I’ve heard you say something like no civilizations of the past are seen in the “revealed.” Does it mean that everything scientists are now finding (in support of a theory of the earlier civilizations) appears in our senses as a reality that we ourselves are demanding? In other words, the external forces react to our demands by creating more new “decorations.”

My Answer: You’re absolutely right! As a result of the descent from spirituality, when the desire created by the Creator reached its lowest level, it perceived within itself what we feel as “me” and the world surrounding us (as external to “me”). The processes and the internal changes started being perceived as time, space and movement (again, external to “me”). This is how a person perceives that something had already existed before he appeared. But who actually sensed it? Without senses, nothing exists. Everything exists in our imagination, in our senses. Read the article “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” item 34.

Related Material:
eBook: Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life
Purchase the Print Version of the Book: Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life

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