A question I received: What’s the meaning of the words “the evil inclination”?

My Answer: The evil inclination is your desire that you define as evil. In Hebrew, the word inclination – Yetzer, originates from the word Ratzon – desire. And it’s not just one desire, but many desires inside you that impede you from attaining the goal of creation, that appear as obstacles on your path.

The stumbling block on the path to the ultimate success is found within you; it’s not anything on the outside. However, you can’t destroy it or get rid of it on your own, despite the fact that you see how much trouble it causes you, how it ruins your life and stands in the way of your success! That is why this quality inside you is called your evil inclination.

The “evil inclination” is evil only when you have made every possible effort to get rid of it… and failed. You then reveal that it has the ultimate power over you and everything you do. It always cheats you, but you forget this and endlessly follow its advice. Thus, the evil is a desire that coerces you.

The recognition of evil is not an easy process. You have to become a true judge of yourself and not give in to being “bribed.” You have to clarify what is your goal, who you are, what your qualities are, and to understand what you have to eliminate within yourself. And then you have to make the utmost effort to do this. And finally, whatever qualities remain that you just can’t change is what you call your evil inclination.

If you do this, you will be prepared for the correction to come from Above, and then the Light will come and correct you. Only once you have done everything in your power can you truly realize what evil is. This, in turn, prepares you to turn to the Creator with a plea and to entreat Him: “I want to get rid of this evil once and for all – but I can’t!”

And that is when you reach the realization that it was Him beneath it all. Inside the evil inclination, you reveal the connection with the Creator, His will in all that has happened. All of the problems that you can’t cope with are sent to you intentionally by the Creator, in order for you to build a connection with Him, to turn to Him.

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A question I received: I would like to receive and share the Light for the sake of the Creator, not me. So, I have been reading your essays, clues, and teachings very happily and thanking you all the time. If you don’t mind, I would like to get your advice on the must-do and must-not-do, or the key works that one must do in order to receive the Light and be a servant of the Creator. I don’t know how many of my 613 (+ 7) egoistic desires have been corrected by now. However, will it be a selfish request if I ask you to help me correct myself and receive the Light and reach the Thought of creation?

My Answer: All of one’s 613 desires become corrected simultaneously. It’s because the soul is always whole and never in parts, just like a drop of semen, an embryo, or an adult always have all the elements of a body.

Your task is to go through the 125 steps of correction. If you ascend to the first step, you will reveal the Creator to the degree designated by this step. I cannot help you do this in the way you are asking me to. I cannot do it for you. I can only nourish you and teach you to grow.

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A question I received: In Kabbalah, “to come out of exile” or to want to come out of exile means to want to rise above one’s egoism. But why would people want to come out of it? A person feels that his egoism is him. Why would he want to come out of himself?

My Answer: Because it’s inevitable! The Creator is the Light that created our desire. Sometimes He shines on a person with the Light a lot, and sometimes not so much. He uses these changes to build new desires in us. However, He does not fill these desires; He simply awakens them and causes them to grow.

This is why, with every passing day, we feel worse in every aspect of our lives. This is also why we want change, since we want changes to happen in order to feel good in our desire to receive pleasure.

And then one day, a small spark appears inside our desire, which comes to us from the Creator Himself. It’s a spark of Light, the property of bestowal, and from this spark or desire, we start to yearn for bestowal.

At first we don’t understand what it is we want. We only feel that what we want must come from a different world. All of a sudden, a person starts feeling that it is useless to receive, that there is no end to reception, and that it doesn’t have any meaning. He wants something different.

Thus, instead of the question, “How can I have meaning in life by receiving pleasure?” a new question arises in a person: “How can I have meaning in life by giving pleasure to someone else?” This question originates from a desire called the point in the heart.

Gradually, a person continues to grow and reaches Lo Lishma, a spiritual search for one’s own sake, and from there he reaches Lishma – for the sake of bestowal.

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A question I received: What is faith in Kabbalah?

My Answer: In Kabbalah, faith is bestowal. It’s when one is able to bestow despite his will to receive. This is called, “faith above reason.”

A person’s nature is the will to receive, and faith is the property of bestowal that’s opposite to our nature. The only way for us to acquire the property of bestowal is with the help of the Upper Light, because it gives us the ability to rise above ourselves and to act out of a different desire: for the sake of others, or for the sake of the Creator. One then acts out of this desire, instead of one’s own, natural desire. And because of this, one becomes dependent on the Upper Level (one becomes “the Creator’s slave”) rather than on oneself (a “slave to oneself”).

Therefore, if you have faith in me, it means that you act for my sake with all of your abilities. Actually, you become like me. That is because normally, every person is completely opposite to another. But if someone has faith in me, it means he has neutralized his desires in regard to me, and through these desires, he and I are one.

The opposite of faith is knowledge, which is when we act for the sake of our own desires. Faith, however, is when we act for the sake of fulfilling the desires of others. When a person has this quality, he is able to sense things outside of himself, through the desires of others. And what one senses through these desires is the higher, spiritual world. This is why faith is closely related to love (love for another person), because love is the ability to replace one’s own desire with the desire of another person, and to fulfill that desire.

As you can see, in Kabbalah, faith is when a person masters the quality of bestowal – a higher quality. Clearly, this bears no relation to faith as it is understood in our world: believing in what someone else says and accepting it as a fact. With this kind of faith, I may accept another person’s mistake or false belief as a fact, and then use it as a foundation for all my actions and my entire life.

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A question I received from my student: Is it correct to say that the Surrounding Light is our thoughts and desires, which influence us?

My Answer: Not entirely. The Surrounding Light is not simply our thoughts and desires, but it is our corrected thoughts and desires. It is the fulfillment that awaits us ahead, and which we have to receive. The Surrounding Light is, in fact, our corrected, good, proper thoughts and desires; it is the heartfelt connection among us that influences us. And the sum total of our corrected thoughts and desires is called “the Creator.” This is why in Hebrew, the Creator is called Bo-re, which means “Come and See.”

The positive energy of bestowal and love that exist in one’s future state, influences a person and his present state. This energy is called the Surrounding Light. Thus, we affect our uncorrected, present state with our corrected future state.

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A question I received: How can we explain in simple terms the technology of the Light that ”brings us back to the Source?”

My Answer: There is a general force in reality, which is a force of bestowal. We perceive it as goodness and as a creator of goodness.

We call this bestowing, kind and goodness-creating force – the Creator or general Nature. It lies in the unification of all the parts of the created Nature, which exist in harmony and absolute interconnection and which possess similar qualities to the force that created them – the quality of bestowal.

We feel bad because we sense that we have left this integral system. If we wish to feel well, we should try to return to this system, which is called perfection. By trying to return to this system by various different means, we awaken a force that influences us from there. This is called the drawing of the Light that reforms, the force that returns us to the general system.

This force acts in accordance with the intensity and the level of our desire – that is, to the extent that we are able to appeal, ask, and demand of the system. This is very much the same way that an infant, a small child, and a grown-up person act differently in our world. The most important thing is that this demand is in accordance with one’s level of development.

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We are in the world of Infinity even now. We act within this world, but the results of our actions are not revealed to us during the period of concealment. However, we are within the same connection between the souls, the same common Kli of Infinity.

Concealment is only in regards to us. While we are in this world, we are situated in the world of Infinity, but we only feel it through five worlds or layers of concealment. The world of Infinity, which we perceive within, is then called our world.

During the period of preparation for revelation, we work against concealment, which is called our world. We wish to achieve a connection, correction and revelation, but we are incapable. However, when our efforts reach their full extent, they turn into a plea.

A person demands the Light from above to come and correct him, which then reveals a state, where he had previously existed. It is as though someone turns on a light bulb, or lights a small candle in a huge room, and a person already sees the same state, the same world of Infinity. This is the world of Assiya.

Therefore, you act in the same world, with the same power and the same desires, but to the extent that you are able to work with them, more becomes revealed to you. You raise all the desires with yourself and continue working. Nothing that existed before disappears. You merely add a conquering force every time, and this is how you advance.

Revelation is a state, where the previous concealment no longer gets in your way. You are able to work within the same concealment, and this is called revelation. You receive such power that you can orient in the same concealment, despite the fact that it is there. However, you can work with  that heaviness, which means that you have risen above it. You then reveal an even greater heaviness, with which you can also reach a connection.

The higher up the steps you climb, the greater the concealment becomes. The only difference is that after the first step, which is called Machsom, you already know how to rise above this concealment and how to work with it and accept it. After all, it is forbidden to reject concealment, otherwise a short circuit failure between the Light and the desire would occur.

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Kabbalah is the method for revealing the Creator to a person (see Baal HaSulam’s article, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”).

Regardless of the fact that the science of Kabbalah was hidden from humanity over the course of thousands of years, by manifesting itself through sciences and social relations in an opposite, egoistic form, it prepared humanity for perceiving it (Kabbalah) as a necessary method in order for everyone to achieve a perfect existence.

However, under the influence of his natural desires and his natural mind, a person must first realize the erroneous course of his independent development. Precisely by moving through the stages of technological, scientific, religious, and social development, and becoming disappointed with them, a person gains the ability to understand the Upper wisdom and mind (higher than those given to him naturally). Having gone through all the methods and realizing their limitations and inability to correct the world, a person comes to reject them and chooses Kabbalah as the only true method of his development.

The reason for such a path of development is related to how the Creator is concealed from a person in order to give him an opportunity to develop on his own and realize the truth. In the same manner that the Creator is concealed in our surroundings, Kabbalah, the method to reveal Him, is concealed in the sciences of our world.

Similar to the development of sciences that lead to the revelation of the science of Kabbalah hidden within them, human development in our world leads to the revelation of the Creator. A person reveals our world through science, and later, with the help of Kabbalah, he reveals the Creator.

Therefore, just as the Creator’s concealment is the cause of all our misfortunes and suffering, to the same extent the concealment of Kabbalah is the reason for all of our suffering.

The science of Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Upper Light, the Light of Hochma which is revealed in the Light of Hassadim (the quality of bestowal) in the corrected egoistic desires. However, the penetration of a considerably weak emanation of Hochma directly into egoistic desires without first being clothed into the Light of Hassadim, gives rise to the sciences of our world.

Since the Light of Hochma that descends into our world (some revelation of the Creator in the sciences of our world, in egoistic desires), descends from revelation of the Creator in the Upper world (the clothing of the Light of Hochma in the Light of Hassadim), it is clear that all the discoveries of Nature that descend into our world are no more than a lesser revelation of the Creator in the science of Kabbalah in the Upper world.

In other words, a very insignificant portion of the truth descends to the sciences of our world from the science of Kabbalah, which is the Upper root of the corporeal sciences, in the same way that our whole world receives only the “Ner Dakik” (a spark of Light) of the Upper Light.

However, specifically from below upwards, meaning from the sciences of our world, can we come to the science of Kabbalah. This is the reason for the revival of all the sciences and, hence, the preparation of the world for revelation of the Creator.

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A question I received: What is the difference between the attainment of mutual guarantee and the reception of the Torah?

My Answer: Mutual Guarantee is a state of oneness. The Torah (Kabbalah) is the means by which one can come to the quality of bestowal; it allows one to reach oneness because it reveals the Creator.

In accordance with the law of equivalence of form, if I reach the desire to “bestow”, the Creator is revealed to me within it. This is because the only quality of the Creator is bestowal and love. While my desire remains uncorrected in similarity with Him, I don’t have anything with which to discover and reveal Him. But without the revelation of the Creator I am not able to correct myself. It’s a catch-22:

• Without having corrected myself, I cannot reveal the Creator

• Without having revealed the Creator, I cannot correct myself!

This is why a method exists which allows one to attract a force which corrects ones desires from reception to bestowal. This method is called Kabbalah and it allows one to attract the Light that reforms while still remaining uncorrected and not having the same qualities as the Light.

This force is called the Surrounding Light. This is the Creator influencing us in a concealed manner. This is why it’s called the Surrounding Light, and not the explicit Direct Light.

From afar, the Surrounding Light can influence something that is removed and opposite to it (egoism) in accordance with a person’s yearning for correction.

The Creator is called  Bore. BO-RE means “come” and “see.”  When I unite with others in our common quality of bestowal, we develop the conditions for the revelation of the Creator. The entire method of correction (Kabbalah) consists of attracting the Surrounding (correcting) Light towards oneself.

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To be in the egoistic desire is to lack the instrument to turn this quality of egoism into the quality of the Creator. The Upper Light, the very quality of the Creator, is that special force that reforms us.

But it only does so in conjunction with our desire to change our qualities from egoistic to altruistic. It must be a true desire, i.e. it must come from the heart, and not by way of words or tears.

To reach such a genuine desire to change constitutes our entire work on ourselves in this life. Those who have undergone this process of transformation of their egoistic desire into the desire to bestow tell us about it in their books.

Just as in our world, parents provide all the necessary conditions for babies and their development, so have the Kabbalists prepared for us all that is necessary for our spiritual development. They have already united into one great soul over the course of centuries and have prepared our future world – and they are waiting there for us.

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