A question I received: According to Kabbalah, we can’t correct ourselves. We have to place ourselves under the influence of the Upper Light. Also, there is no way we could feel the Upper Light. So, in order to place ourselves under the influence of the Light, we have to believe that it exists! Does this mean that at the initial stage (before the Machsom), Kabbalah is a faith and later, after the Machsom, it turns into science?

My Answer: Not exactly, because what incites you to study Kabbalah is not faith or someone’s persuasion, but your desire, the point in the heart that you feel compelled to fulfill. Therefore, it is similar to how you advance in any other science before you have mastered it. You do not have to believe; you have to know. This is what the Creator demands: “All will know Me, from the least of them to the greatest.” The revelation of the Creator is necessary to both man and the Creator.

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A question I received: Where is my “I” in the system of spiritual forces?

My Answer: “I” is the one who reveals them. “I” is the screen upon which they become revealed. “I” is the degree of similarity and revelation. In the spiritual world, it is impossible to draw differences, because you reveal it by means of interaction (Zivug) and unification. It is impossible to divide the spiritual sensation into the attainer and the attained.

Spirituality is a sensation of commonality; it is the result of your involvement with the Upper Level. You are not called “creation” until you reveal the Creator. And when you have this sensation, it is impossible to draw a distinction between Him and you. The creation and the Creator cannot exist without one another, and you reveal this to the degree you become similar to Him.

So, you ask, “Where is my ‘I’ here?” “I” is the degree of your similarity to the Creator. Without it, you don’t exist in the spiritual world.

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A question I received: Kabbalah bases part of its reasoning on a certain chronological order, scaled by the millennia of the Babel Kingdom’s existence and by the dates of Adam’s life in Babylon. However, the work of a modern mathematician in the area of historic chronology (Anatoly Fomenko, Professor of Mathematics at Moscow State University and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences ), casts doubt on the generally accepted sequence and the dates of events. For instance, he dates the Egyptian pyramids to the 11th-14th centuries B.C.E. as per the dates of Zodiacal images found in them. This means that egoism wasn’t growing for 2000 years. The dates of the books can also be wrong, with manuscripts mistakenly dated as being more ancient, when, in fact, they were written later.

Kabbalah, being an extension of science beyond our world into the spiritual, relies on the sciences of this world, including history and chronology. What if the actual chronology is radically revised: can it be possible that the Kabbalists are also mistaken in their descriptions of historic events (the dating of Adam’s life as well as the lives of other Kabbalists?

My Answer: Up until now, all doubts about the Bible’s validity have been proven wrong, historically speaking, which confirms the authenticity of the Biblical story. The Biblical calendar starts with Adam – the beginning of man’s correction in this world, and it concludes with the final correction of all people, throughout 6000 years.

Over the past 5769 years, everything predicted by the Bible (as we, Kabbalists, know) has come true. The Book of Zohar, written 2000 years ago, says that our times (from the year 1995 on) is the time of this book’s revelation. And this is coming true! There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. However, everyone has the right to doubt everything in the world. This is the right of every scientist.

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In the News (translated from Pravda.ru): “New method of treatment makes a patient fly away” A new method of medical treatment is introduced at an oncological hospital … The method is called tanatotherapy, according to Regnum news agency. The notion of tanatotherapy is translated from Latin as treating with death (“tanatos” – death). The new method is based on the effect than psychological influences can have on humans.  Doctors use special techniques to affect a person’s muscles in order to make a patient relax as much as possible. …the method allows a patient to forget about his or her troubles and problems, helps to relieve pain and even inspire an individual to more effectively deal with a most depressing situation.

My Comment: This “treatment with death” makes people less afraid of living because they stop fearing death. However, Kabbalah offers something even better: not just a feeling of comfort that will make it easier for you to go through life and to depart from it, but on the contrary, it opens up your feelings and enables you to reveal both worlds, this one and the hidden, spiritual world. You are able to reveal them completely, and this gives you the opportunity to attain the best thing possible – the feeling of eternity and perfection, due to your equivalence to the Creator.

And to do this, you don’t have to go into states of unconsciousness, but on the contrary, you feel your existence to the fullest, and your sensations keep growing at every moment!

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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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A question I received: We know that the path of spiritual development isn’t easy, and an individual is constantly thrown to the left and the right on it. When all of humanity begins to rise spiritually, how will it go through this process, given that it is not a very smooth path?

My Answer: First of all, those who engage in spiritual development are not the only people thrown in different directions in life. However, when all of humanity embarks on the path of ascending spiritually, it will not be thrown from state to state, but will instead rise calmly and orderly.

The fact of the matter is that the whole world will begin to rise as one man, a huge mass that will have a better appreciation of Nature. This will cause people’s thoughts to change, and little by little their desires will change in the direction of drawing closer to one another.

Humanity as a whole will not experience spiritual rises and falls and will not feel the inner resistance of the force of bestowal against the force of reception, where a person either adheres to his attributes of bestowal or to the egoistic desires of his heart.  The resistance of forces is what causes the experience of ascents and descents.

Conversely, all of humanity as a whole will have just one common desire, and it will join with Nature, merging with it more and more, tuning into Nature and rejecting itself before the common Nature. This will be a beautiful and smooth advancement and revelation – a wonderful path!

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A question I received: You are saying that nature demands that we reach the right kind of connection between us. This week hackers attacked and almost destroyed a web community, Facebook. If nature, the general system of creation, desires to establish a connection between people, why doesn’t it support this network, which reveals a connection between people?

My Answer: Maybe Facebook has exhausted itself in its current form. Instead of trying to protect Facebook from hackers, we have to change it. I believe there is a time, place, and purpose for everything. If forces of opposition are emerging, it means the phenomenon needs to change or disappear. These are just forces of influence, and there is nothing artificial in the world. We have to accept that this is how change and development take place. We shouldn’t react negatively to anything, but rather treat everything as the revelation of evil. When new states cease to emerge, it is a sign that you have reached the Final Correction. However, before that, even the worst state to be revealed isn’t bad in and of itself, but rather, it only reveals the evil to you.

This is how we should view everything. Our greatest enemies reveal the evil in us, and they are not evil on their own. Still, for now you have to eliminate them in order to have an opportunity to perform corrections in our world as quickly as possible. You must eliminate them because they don’t allow you to be corrected, and not because you hate them. You should hate them because they don’t allow you to perform the correction. Then your actions will be justified.
(From the lesson on Baal HaSulam’s article, “One Precept,” on 03.05.2009)

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Three questions I received on the spiritual desire:

Question: First of all, thanks for a great Congress at Blackpool which I thoroughly enjoyed. Which prayers should we be saying as potential Kabbalists? I have watched the children’s lesson on prayer but cannot find the answer. Is there a particular prayer book we should use?

My Answer: A prayer is the heart’s desire. One should do all that one can to make his heart desire the goal of creation – the revelation of the Creator.

Question: Why does the Creator want us to need Him?

My Answer: Because He is the quality of “bestowal and love” within us. And this quality creates a sensation – within us – of an eternal and perfect life.

Question: You say that a person needs to feel a “deficiency.” What kind of deficiency are you talking about: spiritual or corporeal?

My Answer: This means that you must reveal that you don’t love others, and reveal it in such a way that it will suppress your self-love. It is as though you ascend on top of the mountain of your egoism through love for others, and to this degree, the Creator will be revealed to you, or rather, in you.

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The global education system should include the theory and practice of attaining the concealed world. It should teach humanity “the attainment or perception of reality.” Scientists already admit this, but are yet to fully comprehend the fact that we cognize the surrounding reality only in our consciousness, and we cannot perceive the “objective” reality, or what lies beyond the limits of our consciousness.

We must cast aside theories that view the universe as existing outside the limits of our consciousness. Reality is composed of our general experience, including scientific experiments, as well as our thoughts, feelings, and intuition. In addition, to the extent we correct our egoism, we reveal a new world inside our corrected consciousness. However, this new world does not exist until we reveal it within.

Actually, our consciousness is a fundamental concept, and modern science already acknowledges this. We never attain anything outside of our consciousness. This is what the principle of “perception’s self-sufficiency” (autopoiesis) says: everything we perceive as our surroundings, the whole universe as it is perceived by man, exists only in the form that we reveal it.

Self-sufficiency does not come from the nature of the universe, but rather from the nature of our attainment, perception. We cannot suffer from lacking a sixth finger, because the sensation of a desire is the preliminary state, preceding the revelation. The Upper Level is first expressed in us in the form of a desire for it, and then It’s revealed in this desire.

Astrophysicists create new models of a “self-sufficient” universe and describe its structure and functionality as being similar to a living system. They are finding more and more evidence for the fact that the universe is alive and connected into one whole on all its levels. Scientists who study evolution agree that the Earth is similar to a huge living cell because of its global, interconnected system on all its levels of life and development.

However, we are still left with the problem of correction: simply studying and accepting the facts does not mean that you are being corrected and becoming similar to Nature. For this, it is necessary to study the next level of our existence, which is explained only in Kabbalah. It turns out that we are left with the same problem of disseminating Kabbalah in the world. At first this should be done without specifying “Kabbalah,” and only gradually, as Rambam suggests, we should reveal the Source of true wisdom.

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News Report (translated from Scepsis.ru): The recent years, dubbed the “era of globalization,” will not go down in history as years of prosperity. They will be studied (if there will be someone left to study them) as a time of bloody regional wars, the growing poverty of the Third World, and the crisis of the Western middle class; a time when technological progress and financial speculation brought outrageous profit to tens of thousands, while casting hundreds of millions to the bottom of the social ladder.

The current crisis will be no exception: as we speak, some are already making plans to ensure that the losses suffered by the financial speculators will be reimbursed at the expense of regular citizens and debtors from poor countries.

My Comment: It all depends on how you view the crisis. Kabbalah views it as the beginning of goodness – as the revelation of the evil that is our egoism, the revelation that egoism is the one and only source of evil in our lives. It is the reason why we only perceive a tiny, negligible fraction of our eternal existence. This revelation, that egoism is evil, will be followed by a renunciation of it, and then by the correction of human egoism to bestowal and love.

We will then feel our existence as eternal harmony, called the Upper World or Paradise. And we will feel it both during the life of our physical body and after it dies. So let us accelerate this process by studying the method of our correction.

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