Questions I received on studying, defining the spiritual goal, one’s desires, and one’s mind:

Question: What should I study every day?

My Answer: Study the same things we do, together with us.

Question: Should I study only Kabbalah, or are there other books worth studying as well?

My Answer: You should study only what we study. If you are a beginner, then you should study the first and third parts of our daily lesson together with us, but instead of the second part of the lesson (Talmud Eser Sefirot), you can study the materials for beginners on our website.

Question: Do we have to fight our lustful desires in the corporeal world, or should we just study Kabbalah without fighting these desires?

My Answer: Only the study of Kabbalah evokes the Light of correction – Ohr Makif. You will not become more corrected by fighting your desires or restricting yourself in some way. Don’t focus on your properties, but instead strive toward the Creator.

Question: I am somewhat confused about the spiritual goal. Is the goal for me to be happy, or for me to bestow, or to be like the Upper One, or is it to love my neighbor? Or, according to what you said in the latest lessons, is the goal for me to become master of my freedom of choice, or combine the paradox between the place of the Creator and the place of the creation? What is the goal?

My Answer: There is one goal, and it combines everything – all the opposites: The entire Light enters the entire Kli, filling it completely. This state already exists; we must only reveal it for ourselves. It’s similar to a child’s puzzle: There is an image printed on a piece of cardboard, then it’s cut up into small pieces and the child has to put it together. This is how the child learns to connect all the different parts into one whole – and we will have to do the same thing with all the elements of creation.

Question: Is the ego (my will to receive), my mind that observes the reality?

My Answer: That is absolutely correct. Inside your desire, you perceive yourself, the world, and your existence. The mind is produced by the egoistic desires, or derived from them. The mind comes into being and grows to degree that one aspires to fulfill one’s desires. The more desires one has, and the larger these desires are, the greater is the mind that accompanies them. Hence, since Kabbalah develops one’s desires, it also prompts the development of the mind (the brain).

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I had a conversation that was recorded called “Kabbalists Write.” We discussed my fourth book, Attaining the Worlds Beyond. I spoke with Ben-Tzion Gertz, a writer and an editor of several of my books in Hebrew.

Immediately after my teacher’s passing (September 1991), I had to go to Toronto to visit my dying father. I wrote this book after I returned, following the death of my father (February 1992). I think that more than any other of my books, it conveys the feelings of a person who is beginning the path of Kabbalah, one’s impressions from encountering the world of Kabbalah. This is exactly how I saw this book – the first of a series of books that I would write.

Here is an introductory chapter from the book Attaining the Worlds Beyond:

“The need for this text became apparent to me from the questions that I received from my students, and from the questions that were asked during various lectures and radio programs, as well as from the letters that continue to flood in from all over the world.

The difficulty of explaining and teaching Kabbalah lies in the fact that the spiritual world has no counterpart in our world. Even if the object of our studies becomes clear, our understanding of it is only temporary. What we learn is grasped by the spiritual component of our ability to understand, which is constantly renewed from Above. Thus, a subject we initially understand may appear unclear at a later date. Depending on our mood and our spiritual state, the text can appear as either full of deep meaning, or entirely meaningless.

Do not despair if what was so clear yesterday becomes very confusing today. Do not give up if the text appears to be vague, strange, or illogical. Kabbalah is not studied for the sake of acquiring theoretical knowledge, but to help us see and perceive what is hidden from us. When, after we have contemplated and acquired spiritual strength, we begin to see and perceive, then our ability to attain the resulting spiritual lights and levels will bring us to true knowledge.

Until we can comprehend the Upper Light and can perceive what it presents to us, we will not understand how the universe is built and how it works, since there are no analogies to these concepts in our own world.

This text can help ease our first steps toward perceiving the spiritual forces. At later stages, we will be able to progress only with the help of a teacher.

This text should not be read in an ordinary fashion. Rather, we should concentrate on a paragraph, think about it, and attempt to understand examples that reflect in the issues discussed. We may then try to apply these issues to our own personal experiences.

We should patiently and repeatedly read and think about each sentence as we try to penetrate the author’s feelings. We should also read slowly, trying to extract the nuances of what is written, and if need be, return to the beginning of each sentence.

This method can either help us delve into the material with our own feelings, or recognize that our feelings are lacking regarding a particular issue. If the latter is the case, it is a crucial prerequisite for us to move forward spiritually.

This text is not written for quick reading. Though it deals with one subject only, ‘How to relate to the Creator,’ it deals with it in different ways. This allows each of us to find the particular phrase or word that will transport us into the depths of the text.

Although the desires and actions of egoism are described in the third person, until we can separate our personal consciousness from our desires, we should consider the aspirations and desires of egoism our own. The word “body” in the text does not relate to the physical self, but to ‘egoism,’ our desire to receive.

To get the most out of this material, I recommend reading the same passages at different times and in different states of mind. By doing so, you can better acquaint yourself with your reactions and attitudes towards the same text on different occasions.

Disagreeing with the material is always positive, as is agreeing with it. The most important aspect of reading the text is your response to it. A feeling of disagreement indicates you have reached the preliminary stage (achoraim, the backside) of understanding, which prepares you for the next stage of perception (panim, face).

It is precisely through this slow meaningful manner of reading that you can develop feelings, or ‘vessels’ (kelim). These are necessary for us to receive spiritual sensations. Once the vessels are in place, the Upper Light will be able to enter them. Prior to their formation, the Light merely exists around you, surrounding your soul, although you cannot perceive it.

This text is not written to enhance your knowledge. Nor is it meant to be memorized. In fact, we must never test ourselves on the material.

It is even better if we forget the contents altogether, so that the second reading will seem fresh and entirely unfamiliar. By forgetting the material, it implies that we have grasped the previous sensations and that they have now subsided, leaving a space to be filled by sensations we have yet to experience. The process of developing new sensory organs is constantly renewed and accumulated in the spiritual, unperceived sphere of our souls.

The most important aspect of our reading is the way we feel about the material while reading it, not afterwards. Once we experience these feelings, they become revealed within the heart and mind, and manifest themselves when they are needed in the continuous process of the soul’s development.

Rather than rushing to complete reading the text, it is recommended to concentrate on the sections that appeal to us the most. Only then will the text be able to help and guide us in our search for personal spiritual ascent. The goal of this text is to help us become interested in the mysteries of life, such as:

Why were we born into this world? Can we enter the spiritual worlds from here? Can we ever understand the purpose of the creation? Is it possible to perceive the Creator, eternity and immortality? How can we begin to grow spiritually?”

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A question I received: If there is none else but the Creator, then who ruined the common soul that was perfect in the beginning, making it need correction? In your book Attaining the Worlds Beyond, you wrote about the Creator’s “mistake.” If this is the answer to my question – that the Creator made a mistake, then why did you put the word “mistake” in quotation marks?

My Answer: We make our children learn by building things out of Lego pieces, solving problems, putting together puzzles – or in other words, by creating. This makes them grow up to be mature, intelligent people.

The Creator created a perfect universe. However, in order to give us the opportunity to grow to His level, He destroyed the initial creation completely, and it fell to the lowest state – our world. He did this to give us the opportunity to create that perfect creation. All the means for doing this are inside us, and Kabbalah tells us how to do it.

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Questions I received on whether one should visit the graves of the righteous, and what to ask for at these sites:

Question: I want to visit the graves of the righteous on Mount Miron. The trip I’m interested in going on will be held at night, and the trip’s organizer said that according to Kabbalah, you can use the moon’s cycle to calculate what is the best time to ask to be cured from illness. However, I also heard another opinion from someone who studies Kabbalah – he said that this shouldn’t be done. I would like to find out whether it can be done, and why at night?

My Answer: No one ever visits graves at night. The one exception is the night of Lag BaOmer, when people light bonfires all over Israel, including Mount Miron, by the grave of Rashbi, the author of The Book of Zohar. This is an ancient custom. However, asking to be cured from illness when there is a full moon has nothing to do with Kabbalah, but only with mysticism and shamanism.

Rabash and I used to go to Tiberius for two days out of the week, and sometimes we visited the grave of Rashbi on Mount Miron. Rabash respected that place. However, he didn’t see it as a place to ask for people’s corporeal, egoistic problems to be solved, such as healing, but rather only as a place to ask for similarity to the Creator. When one is there, he should ask for the ability to love his neighbor, instead of being concerned with one’s animate body, with healing it, or other benefits.

By definition, Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Creator (the property of love and bestowal) to a person in this world (in this life). Kabbalah bears no relation to receiving something for oneself. (See the definition in the article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah.”)

Between the years 1979 and 1991, when I knew Rabash, he visited the Wailing Wall only once – in 1983. He just walked past the wall, at least 2-3 meters away from it, and didn’t even come close to it, not to mention touching it. He visited the grave of the Ari once in ten years.

Baal HaSulam once said that he really doesn’t care where they’ll bury the bag with his bones. When he passed away and his students didn’t know where to bury him, one student remembered that Baal HaSulam used to like walking on a specific hill, and that’s where they buried him.

Once I asked Rabash for permission to fix up Baal HaSulam’s grave – to whiten it, make a place for candles, and so on. Rabash told me to leave this to others, because there were more important things to do.  Rabash also didn’t prepare a burial place for himself, even though it’s a custom among the religious. (In the past bodies weren’t buried, but locked in a cave that was dug for this purpose. They were left there for some time, and when only the bones remained, they were placed into a vessel.)

Kabbalists do not respect anything corporeal. Every person respects what is important to him, and what he is attached to – the body or the soul. To a Kabbalist, the body is intended to do work, just like an animal (for example, cattle). All his attention is focused on developing the soul – the part of the Creator in man, the property of love and bestowal.

Question: Rashbi is buried on Mount Miron, and thousands of people visit his grave every year. Is this something the Creator instructed them to do, or do these instructions come from religious leaders who want to influence people and have power over them?

My Answer: Kabbalah favors this custom, because it brings people closer to Kabbalah, making them respect it and become interested in it.

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A news report that appeared in The Economist: “A battle of ideas is going on inside your mind.” That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it.

Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.That is strange. Until now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess, they make the most accurate guess that they can. Ask them to make a second guess and it should, by definition, be less accurate. If that were true, averaging the first and second guesses should decrease the accuracy. Yet Edward Vul at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harold Pashler at the University of California, San Diego, have revealed in a study just published in Psychological Science that the average of first and second guesses is indeed better than either guess on its own.

The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the “CIA World Factbook”: for example, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the USA?” Half the participants were unexpectedly asked to make a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.

Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.

Even after three weeks, the result is still only one-third as good as the wisdom of several different people. But that this happens at all raises questions about “individuality” within an individual. If guesses can shift almost at random, where are they coming from?

My Comment: Everything comes from the common informational field – the common soul. We are all connected in one system, and it makes no difference whether we realize it or not. For the time being, we are in an unconscious state in relation to this system – a state Kabbalah calls “sleeping.”

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Two questions I received on overcoming our fears:

Question: In one of your lessons on the book Shamati you spoke about fear, and you said that when a person is afraid, he should immediately connect to the Creator. Can you elaborate on this? What should I do when I feel chilled to the bone with worry about my loved ones?

My Answer: You should connect everything that is happening with the Creator, with yourself, and with the entire world, so that all of these will unite into one and there won’t be any difference between them. All of your doubts and fears should vanish within this union. And if they don’t – then it’s even better! Then you can ask the Creator to help you.

Actually, if you open The Book of Zohar , you’ll discover that the first correction, “Pkuda Kadma” (in Aramaic) is when one attains true fear. In fact, fear always haunts everyone and everything: On the still level of nature, there is fear to preserve its structure, on the vegetative and animate levels of nature, there is fear to become filled with what’s necessary and to push away what’s harmful. And it’s the same with man.

Question: Can studying Kabbalah help one get rid of his fears, for example, the fear of being on stage or of expressing one’s opinion?

My Answer: Yes, because studying Kabbalah develops your perception of the unity of everything, of the integral universe. It also replaces one’s earthly fears with the true fear – the need to attain the Creator.

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Power is the fundamental property of egoism. When we lose it, we feel as if we’ve lost ourselves. Even our perception of the things around us is based on the sensation of power: Our senses perceive everything by evaluating their influence on different objects, things, and forces – by weighing, “who is stronger?”

When one becomes aware of his constant aspiration to rule over his environment (and again – without this aspiration, one cannot perceive the environment), then this realization leads one to recognize the evil within himself. He then feels the need to revoke his all-inclusive lust to rule over everything, and to replace it with the opposite quality – “Anava” (being absent).

Inside this aspiration or quality, one discovers the Creator. The Creator hides from us inside this property in order to give us the opportunity to attain (without His obvious influence) the same height, omnipotence, independence, greatness, and humbleness of love as He has.

One then discovers that he acquires power over everything precisely by yielding to others, because he then becomes incorporated into the general Light. This correlation – “the Creator and the creation” – can be described as calm, omnipotent, and uniform white Light that fills everything, and inside it there are small, black, egoistic balls that are anxiously jumping because they aspire to realize their foolish pride, conceit, and power.

It is written: “In the place where you attain the Creator’s greatness, you attain His humbleness (Anava).” Hence, power comes through the property of love and bestowal.

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A question I received: What do you think about disseminating Kabbalah to the masses through Christianity and Islam? Applying the method of Kabbalah to the study of the Gospel yields tremendous results. You begin to understand that you’re not reading fairytales about magic tricks, but about attempts to change something in the spiritual world, and you want to explain this to everyone who doesn’t yet know or understand it. I think that you should explain this to your Christian students, especially since the Old Testament is a major part of the Bible. Once they understand this, once they feel the bliss of true attainment without having to be detached from their culture and religion, then perhaps they will take it even further.

My Answer: Religion is not connected to Kabbalah in any way, but is actually opposite to it. Religion was given to humanity to be a framework for life in the time of darkness, before the revelation of Kabbalah. And this is why religion is dying out in our times, although this process is lengthy and it’s possible that there will still be religious wars in the future.

We do not approach religious Jews, and we disseminate Kabbalah only among the secular public. There’s nothing new about showing religious people that the Torah contains a deeper meaning. However, they’re not interested in this, because it knocks out the foundation of their faith – the egoistic principle of our world, “Do certain actions and you’ll receive a reward.”

Kabbalah, on the other hand, contradicts egoism, and tells you that you won’t receive anything for your actions (you won’t receive anything into your egoism, that is). Your entire reward lies in being corrected by the Upper Light, in loving your neighbor as yourself.

This is something you can only say to people who have already gone through all the egoistic desires and have a “point in the heart” – the desire for the Creator or the meaning of life. People who are still satisfied by faith do not have a “point in the heart” yet, and therefore we cannot talk to them for now. Kabbalah reveals the law of spiritual development to a person, but this development can only happen when it’s free and non-coercive – and that’s another aspect that’s fundamentally opposite to religion.

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Noah, the well-known character from the Torah, represents a stage in one’s spiritual development. It’s when a person realizes that his egoism is evil, and that he cannot save himself from it because it is his entire nature. He then understands that only the Upper Force, which is outside him, can change him. This is why he builds the Ark – or in other words, in response to his appeals, the Upper Light creates the property of Bina (bestowal) in him, and he then remains inside it so that his egoistic desires and properties will no longer rule over him. When he enters the Ark, he ascends above egoism and enters the realm of bestowal, isolating himself from his egoism, his nature.

Today every one of us and the entire world as a whole are beginning to feel that we are in a threatening state – the state of Noah before the Flood. We are being threatened by the inner (individual) and outer (worldwide) Flood (egoism), which we have brought upon ourselves and cannot overcome on our own. Our only salvation is to hide in the Ark, that is – for every person and for everyone together to acquire the property of bestowal, to ascend above our egoism. Then everything will reach harmony – just like all the species of creatures that were in the Ark, and we will make the transition to renewed life.

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Questions I received on movement, celebrities, the Masons, and pop music that uses prayers for lyrics:

Question: Dear Rav, I envy everything that moves. What can I do about it?

My Answer: Also move! (Meaning spiritual movement!)

Question: Why do you have conversations with celebrities, with people who are famous, instead of ordinary people? Do you really need the publicity? Do these talks with celebrities flatter your ego?

My Answer: Famous people meet different people thousands more times than ordinary people do. After my conversations with them they gain an understanding of the great value that Kabbalah has for every person and for the whole world, and they begin disseminating Kabbalah on a broad scale, or rather – they bring the Kabbalistic idea to the world. Experience proves this!

The reason I’m doing this is to accelerate man’s recognition of evil so he wouldn’t have to actually go through it in reality. As the Soviet satiric writer Zhvanetsky once said, “The difference between a clever person and a wise person is that a clever person gets out of a difficult situation with huge efforts, but a wise person never gets into that situation.” I want to be wise and I wish the same for everyone else.

Question: What is the connection between the Masons and Kabbalah, if there is any?

My Answer: There is no connection at all. Even my attempt a few years ago to give a lecture for the Masons in Jerusalem failed – they were scared. Secret brotherhoods of any type feel sick in the stomach at the thought of Kabbalah, because Kabbalah promotes wide dissemination to everyone, while the Masons aspire to maintain secrecy. However, there are no hidden forces there, but only traditions and a belief in their exclusivity.

I’m sure that the wave of world-wide change will soon overtake them, as well as all the other philosophies and religions. The only things that will remain will be man, the Creator and the connection between them, while the Masons’ protocols and religious faith “in something” will disappear.

Question: Recently we often hear the song “אנא בכוח,” with moving lyrics that go straight into the heart. Can you explain this text?

My Answer: Why does it move you so much if you don’t know the meaning of the text? Who taught you to think of this prayer in a special way? You wrote, “Recently we often hear” – but I’d like to ask you: who hears it, and where? I have never heard about it! I only know this prayer from the prayer book. In religion and in Kabbalah, no one treats it in a special way. This is just another “sensation” – someone just wants to stand out!

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